Thursday, September 03, 2009

Pydev 1.5.0 (Pydev Extensions Open Sourced)

Today, Aptana is proud to announce that Pydev and Pydev Extensions have become a single plugin, with all the available contents open source (and freely available for anyone) in the 1.5.0 release (it's the same as 1.4.8 but with all the code open source).

With that, Aptana believes in providing a better service and growth path for Pydev (which will still be actively maintained by Aptana), enabling anyone to provide contributions to the previously closed source product, while providing its Cloud customers a better service.

Note for those already using Pydev or Pydev Extensions:

The update site has been changed (see: http://www.pydev.org/download.html for more details) and if you had a previous install of Pydev Extensions, you need to uninstall it before installing the new version of Pydev.

Note for developers:

Pydev is now available under git (at github), and its previously used subversion will be disabled. Instructions on getting the source code from the new location is available at: http://www.pydev.org/developers.html

First, let me say that we truly appreciated the support you've given to Pydev while buying a Pydev Extensions license -- those payments were what kept Pydev going on for a long time, and actually enabled Pydev to get to the point it is now... When I started developing Pydev, it relied only on donations, but unfortunately, it's much easier to get money from something closed source than it's from something open source, so, it got to a point where going closed source was the only way to go.

Now, with the Aptana acquisition, and other sources of revenue, Pydev is now able to go to its original plan, which is being available for anyone... And existing users can treat that in 2 ways, as a loss or as a gain -- although in my view it's a bit unfair treating it as a loss, as it's mostly just a perceived loss, because you actually still have what you paid for -- and more because you now have source code access and will be able to use it for more than 1 year and will still have proper support, and as I said previously, that was the money that got it to be open source again.

Now, if you're still unhappy about the situation, please drop me and e-mail so that I can see what can be done...

This is so great! I kind of always wanted to start using Python seriously, but IDLE is simply not up to the task. Productivity I gained with Python, I lost with IDLE. But now it's a different story! PyDev rocks! Thank you very, very much for it!